Traversal

Traversal

Traversal is an AI site reliability engineer (SRE) agent that pinpoints the true root cause of complex production incidents in minutes instead of hours. Founded in 2023 by causal-inference researchers from MIT, Columbia, and Cornell, Traversal pairs frontier AI agents with causal machine learning to trace failures across thousands of services and recent code changes. When an incident hits, Traversal runs a causal search over telemetry and deploy history to isolate the breaking change, rather than surfacing symptoms. Enterprises including American Express and PepsiCo run Traversal to shorten on-call firefighting and reduce mean time to resolution.

Production credibility: Founded in 2023 in New York City. Co-founders: Anish Agarwal (CEO; PhD from MIT, former tenure-track faculty at Columbia), Raj Agrawal, Raaz Dwivedi (faculty at Cornell Tech), and Ahmed Lone (Columbia master's; former quant trader at Citadel Securities). Raised $48M total across seed and Series A, with Sequoia Capital leading the seed and Kleiner Perkins leading the Series A; participants include NFDG and Hanabi, plus angels such as Nat Friedman and Mike Volpi. Amex Ventures has also invested strategically. Named customers include American Express, PepsiCo, DigitalOcean, Eventbrite, and Cloudways. At American Express, Traversal reported an 82% root-cause accuracy rate and a 32% reduction in potential mean time to resolution within six months of deployment.

Key Features

• Causal Search Engine that isolates the true breaking change among thousands of signals
• Frontier AI agents combined with causal machine learning for root-cause analysis
• Automatically correlates telemetry, logs, and recent deploys during live incidents
• Traces failures across large microservice graphs without manual cross-team coordination
• Surfaces root cause in minutes for incidents that previously took hours
• Alert triage automation to reduce on-call noise and firefighting
• Production insights that flag fragile code paths before they break
• Deployed inside Fortune 100 environments including American Express and PepsiCo

Ideal Use Case

Enterprise SRE and DevOps teams use it during live incidents to automatically trace root cause across microservices and recent deploys, cutting investigation time on high-impact outages.

How Traversal differentiates

Traversal's wedge is causal machine learning: where Resolve AI markets a broad agentic interface to production, Traversal focuses on accurately isolating the one breaking change among thousands of signals. Against dashboards like Datadog or observability tools, Traversal does the reasoning a human would do across those tools, not just visualization. It reports an 82% root-cause accuracy rate and a 32% reduction in mean time to resolution at American Express. The trade-off is scope: Traversal is deliberately narrower than full-lifecycle remediation platforms, and as a 2023-founded startup its enterprise integrations are still expanding.

FAQ

Q: What is Traversal? A: Traversal is an AI SRE agent that uses causal machine learning to find the true root cause of complex production incidents in minutes.

Q: Who founded Traversal? A: Causal-inference researchers Anish Agarwal (CEO, ex-MIT/Columbia), Raj Agrawal, Raaz Dwivedi (Cornell Tech), and Ahmed Lone (ex-Citadel), in 2023.

Q: How much has Traversal raised? A: $48M total across seed and Series A, with Sequoia leading the seed and Kleiner Perkins leading the Series A.

Q: How accurate is Traversal? A: At American Express, Traversal reported an 82% root-cause accuracy rate and a 32% reduction in potential mean time to resolution within six months.

Q: Traversal vs Resolve AI: how do they compare? A: Traversal specializes in causal root-cause analysis; Resolve AI offers a broader agentic interface to production actions like rollbacks and config changes.

tl;dr

Traversal is an AI SRE agent that uses causal machine learning to pinpoint the true root cause of complex incidents in minutes. Founded in 2023 and backed by Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins with $48M, it runs inside Fortune 100 environments like American Express and PepsiCo.

Related

Looking for more options? Browse the Developer Tools directory or read our best AI coding tools listicle. Traversal is also tracked on Crunchbase.